Thursday, August 9, 2012

since i can remember i've had a fascination with knifes. i willingly joined cub scouts when i was in elementary school solely because i was promised that i'd be able to carry a knife. this was mom's way of teaching me knife safety. for a while, anytime i traveled somewhere i'd buy a knife as my souvenir. it's too bad i didn't keep that tradition, as my knife collection today would be vast and interesting to say the least.

so recently i've been learning how to sharpen knifes, like really sharpen them. i purchased an edge pro knock off and a sided strop block. the edge pro knock off comes with 4 stones of grit 180, 400, 800, and 1500. here's my setup.

i was able to use these tools to sharpen my current set of kitchen knifes, which were very well cared for and still had a decent edge on them. i wanted to challenge myself, could i put a sharp edge on any blade?

i found this hoffritz knife for sale at a local garage sale: $1 there were chips the size of the grand canyon, but i figured that if i completely screw up this knife then i have only lost the time that i've put into it.

this is after about an hour of grinding with the roughest stone. you can see that there's somewhat of an edge coming into vision, but those chips are still very prominent.

here is a close up via 10x magnification of the edge. there are some burrs on the edge, but you can see that i've practically carved a new edge on the blade.

the tip was also somewhat missing, so i took the stone to it in order get finer tip.

and after about 3 hours of stones, and 1 hour of strop i had a finished piece. look at that beautiful edge.

since i had to hog off so much material, the blade isn't 100% straight, from this angle you can see the slight wave. this doesn't affect anything, and will probably only be noticed by me.

the blade is very thin and flexible. i'm not putting much force on this at all.

so how sharp is it you ask? sharp enough to shave the hairs off of my left thumb digit that's how sharp! i left one hair for good measure.

here's my right thumb for reference of how much hair i shaved.

i'm still a novice behind the stones and strop, but learning is what i enjoy so having plenty to learn pleases me.